‘The Prince’: Timeless Tips for Tyrants
A review of ‘The Prince’, by Niccolò Machiavelli; Hackett Classics, 1995.
The Prince is a guide to power. It deals with the choices and conditions that govern the rise, reign and fall of rulers. There is no Renaissance idealism: we find only steely realpolitik. For Machiavelli is the supreme pragmatist, interested in the harsh facts of rule. We must accept there is an uneasy tension between moral principle and political need. Indeed, he takes it as read that bad behaviour is justified if it brings political glory.
Machiavelli’s world is uncertain. It is marked by shifting alliances, treacherous advisors, public views that change like the weather. The prince must be ready to do harm if conditions demand it. His power always hangs by a thread, and he must therefore be part-lion, part-fox: strong enough to scare the wolves but with the wits to steer clear of traps. Within this lies Machiavelli’s theme: that survival rests not on virtue but adaptability. The prince must know when to lie, strike, flatter, settle. Impressions often hold more sway than the truth.
Machiavelli’s key theme: that survival rests not on virtue but adaptability.
It is not that Machiavelli likes what he sees as the reality of politics. He simply deals in facts. In the true sense of the term, he is a political scientist, chopping up his subject like a frog on a table to reveal the organs inside. His famous aphorism, that ‘it is better to be feared than loved’, is not, then, an invitation to tyranny. It is a clinical observation: that loyalty born of fear is more reliable than that which is based on affection. He is brutally clear on this point: love is fickle, frail, dependent on the will of others. Fear is steadfast, because its dispensation lies within the ruler’s control.
Machiavelli advises both ruthlessness and caution. He respects the elasticity of power, the way it can snap or stretch depending on the power of the prince to grasp his circumstances and shape them. He prefers prudence to impetuousness, stressing the importance of timing. When he writes that rulers should avoid being hated, he is not discussing justice. He is saying that hatred threatens stability. Everything, for the prince, should be a calculation, a balancing act of cruelty and clemency, fear and favour.
Machiavelli’s environment — the chaotic, balkanised Italy of his time — is the grim backdrop to his treatise. That context gives the book its climate of instability and threat. City-states war with one another; foreign powers step in; rulers rise and fall with alarming speed. His world is one in which moral questions fall away in the face of the need to survive. This is what gives The Prince its harsh, almost metallic edge. There are no ideals, just the hard currency of political need.
Machiavelli’s environment — the chaotic, balkanised Italy of his time — is the grim backdrop to his treatise.
I risk repeating myself, but what makes The Prince so striking is its lack of sentiment. The Medici, Cesare Borgia, Sforza —these are not great men by the classical standards of virtue. They are men shaped by the demands of the moment, their reputations made by the success of their actions, not their goodness. Machiavelli’s style reflects this. His prose is dry, forensic, to the point. There are no grand flourishes: just the steady, methodical unspooling of advice, broken up with historical cases that show the effects of failure.
The Prince, in the end, asks us to face up to some uneasy truths about power. It is dirty; the ethical high road is often the road to defeat; the most successful leaders are those who bend, break, and remake the rules. Machiavelli does not celebrate this; his work is not an hymn to tyranny. Rather, it is a grim assessment of how the world works—or at least, how he saw it working. His final tip, that fortune is like a river, dammed and diverted with force and foresight, amounts to a bleak and final vision of political life. Success belongs not to the righteous, but to those who master the currents of the river, who can guide or stop them as necessity dictates. This is a masterpiece of detached, unblinking realism, a book that flays illusions and lays bare the polished bones of political power.
